White House tweets to blunt speech critics

President Barack Obama’s Syria address was widely panned by leading foreign policy journalists on Tuesday night, leading to an intense pushback effort by top White House spokespeople on Twitter.

In messages directed at journalists from The New York Times, Bloomberg and other outlets, the White House communications team sought to wrest control of the narrative going forward even as the speech was being criticized as among the most ineffective in the history of the American presidency.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Mike Allen's top takeaways

“Tonight’s speech was very probably the least consequential vitally important speech ever,” David Rothkopf, the CEO of the Foreign Policy Group tweeted. “President [sent] crystal clear message that on Syria the thing he feels strongest about is his own ambivalence.”

“Maybe it would have been better to have postponed the speech along with the vote,” wrote Jeffrey Goldberg, the Bloomberg View columnist. “After two years of saying Assad should go, the message now is Assad can stay. We just want to take away one of his weapons systems.”

Those tweets and others, which came from some of the most influential voices in foreign policy journalism, elicited a strong and immediate pushback from the Obama administration.

White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes responded to Goldberg’s tweet by writing, “US position remains Assad leaving power as part of political process. But we must also act to specifically remove CW [chemical weapons] threat.”

The Obama aide made a similar effort when responding to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who asked: “Does it bother anyone else that the basic Obama message to dictators is: When you slaughter your people, don’t use gas.”

Wrote Rhodes, “Any slaughter is abhorrent.. Conventional attacks led us to sanction Assad, declare him illegitimate, and support opposition. CW is in distinct category. Banned by international law - threat to civilians, global security, and international order.”

While Rhodes worked on Goldberg and Kristof, White House press secretary Jay Carney tweeted quotes from Obama’s speech — “Getting the word out by all available means!,” he tweeted at one Time Magazine reporter — and Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s assistant and senior advisor, tried to counter journalists who argued that Obama’s speech was “old news.”

“[W]e don’t assume the public follows the news as closely as leading political columnists,” Pfeiffer wrote to The Las Vegas Sun’s Jon Ralston. And to Goldberg, he tweeted, “[P]residents don’t ask for time to address columnists who follow every minute of the news, it’s for the public that doesn’t.”

The speech was plagued from the get-go because of rapidly changing developments. In the last 48 hours, Syria had accepted a plan to turn over its chemical weapons and sign an international treaty, forcing White House speechwriters to scramble on a revision of Obama’s remarks.

But even in the eyes of some in the mainstream media, the result was a fractured and uncertain speech — what NBC News political director Chuck Todd described as “two speeches”: one that was clear and concise, another that seemed to have been written days ago, before the Syrian proposal took place.

Leading minds on foreign policy were unforgiving, and panned the speech as contradictory and inconsequential.

“He should have postponed,” Goldberg told POLITICO. “Basically he said — our military is ready; John Kerry is going to Geneva, and poison gas is very bad.”

In an email to POLITICO, Rothkopf called the speech “a string of his recent arguments culminating in a punt.”

“It seems clear he wishes this would all go away and that he is very uncomfortable with the spot he finds himself,” Rothkopf wrote. “The thing he feels strongest about is his own ambivalence.”

Ceding a little ground, though not much, Phillip Gourevitch, the New Yorker staff writer, tweeted: “That it’s pure rhetoric w/no substance may be understandable w/confused state of play but it clarifies nothing.” He added: “Obama did make strong case for likely ineffectiveness of action in Syria, while declaring its necessity.”